


My Girlfriend is a Superhero

by pissedoffpineapples



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, One Shot, Short, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-11 22:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5643457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pissedoffpineapples/pseuds/pissedoffpineapples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My girlfriend is a superhero. Sometimes I forget, looking over her petite form and sour expression. I forget and remember the connotations that such a word holds. Superhero. All publicity and smiles, all muscle and physique. A star in their own element. </p><p>I forget, when I watch her down a flask of whisky or flop down to sleep in an unmade bed. Or when I watch her pick up the clothes she wore yesterday off the floor and pull them back on in a way that is both strikingly alluring and ridiculous. I forget because these are not things a superhero ordinarily does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Girlfriend is a Superhero

**Author's Note:**

> Rated T for blood mention, just to be safe.

My girlfriend is a superhero. Sometimes I forget, looking over her petite form and sour expression. I forget and remember the connotations that such a word holds. Superhero. All publicity and smiles, all muscle and physique. A star in their own element.  
I forget, when I watch her down a flask of whisky or flop down to sleep in an unmade bed. Or when I watch her pick up the clothes she wore yesterday off the floor and pull them back on in a way that is both strikingly alluring and ridiculous. I forget because these are not things a superhero ordinarily does.

But I always remember. When she come through my door (or sometimes, my window) with blood on her brow and even more on her shirt. A bloody nose, the crimson drippings covering her top lip and wiped hastily from her chin.  
I remember because my heart leaps into my chest when I see it, wondering feverishly if the blood soaking her jeans came from her own sweet veins. Seconds later, however, I know it's the other guys' and I feel better, albeit hesitantly so. It gives me a knot in my throat and I swallow as I watch her wipe the remaining blood from her lips with the sleeve of her jacket. 

She drops a casual grin acting as her way, tonight at least, of saying hello and instantly, I know she's alright. My girlfriend is a superhero, because with one single movement, a turn up of the lips that is more smirk than smile, she reassures me. I feel the sweat on my palms begin to dry. The lump dissolves to saliva and I shakily smile back. 

I step forward, no longer hesitant, because of the trust I know we've reestablished in one another. I wrap my arms around her waist and feel the swell of heat her body creates. I inhale the smell of her bird's nest of dark hair, and dare to smooth some of it down with a clammy palm. 

It's a few minutes before her hands slide up my spine to take their place on my shoulders. But they're there, and that's all that matters. It's enough to revive my smile and we stand there, myself unconcerned to the point of flippancy that I'm wearing a stark white shirt. 

My girlfriend is a superhero. It's not always obvious, when I look at her arms as she lets her jacket fall to the laundry room floor. Thin, lanky arms, they always reminded me of tree branches. They show no bulk or muscle, no bulging pockets to prove her strength. She doesn't need them. 

She lifts up her arms and with one easy, upwards movement, her tanktop is in my hands. The blood is worse on her jeans and she unbuttons them, shaking out of their constraint by almost absentmindedly wiggling slender hips. The blue garment falls to the floor and I can't help but smile as I watch her stoop down to get it with that same flat expression. She passes them to me, and I note that they're heavier in my hand. I note also the faded residue of red on her pale thighs. She follows my eyes and begins to scrub incessantly at her flesh with the palm of her hand. 

With a little shake of the head and a smirk, I turn around and chuck her battle scarred clothing in the washer behind me. I close the door and get ready to start the cycle, when she whirls me around with an accusatory finger pointed at my chest. We still have yet to utter a single word, but I know now that she's going to speak based on the twist of her lips. I wait, hand on my hip and brandishing an incredulous look and before long I'm greeted by the cracked huskiness of her voice. 

“Your shirt. I got blood on you.”

I glance down at myself, thinking that we must be the only couple in existence to have such utterly bizarre conversations, and see the crimson smear on the angel white fabric. “Shit,” is the only word I whisper, and she chuckles in good humour as I proceed to pull it off and throw it in the washer carelessly with the rest of her clothes. If the colours bleed, well. The shirt was ruined anyway. I close door and start the cycle, feeling the damp chill of my laundry room prickle my newly bare skin. 

There we are, standing mostly in our underwear as the washer rumbles into action like a long sleeping beast. I sigh and rest my hand on it, turning my body around and realizing that I didn't even hear her move closer to me. With footsteps that quiet and orderly, I realize all over again that she was made for PI work.

My girlfriend is a superhero. I know it when I feel the strength that flows out of her as she wraps those creaky-branch arms around my hips and lifts me as if I were filled with feathers, like a pillow. It feels like I'm filled with helium for a moment, pushed upwards by a forceful gust of wind. It doesn't feel the same way as a muscular man's arms have before felt, lifting me. I could feel the strain of the human body, the experience of being squeezed and lifted by all that mass.

This was different. It felt like little more than a push. A simple, effortless motion as easy as it had been for me to wrestle her tank over the top of her head. This wisp like strength boosts me onto the top of the washer and I can feel its rickety rumbling vibrating beneath me suddenly. Her arms wrap around me again and this time the hesitation has lost itself somewhere else. She wastes no time encircling me in her embrace. I feel a flutter in my chest as her familiar lips approach, and it fades away with a streak of heat shooting through my abdomen towards my groin as a deep kiss grows between us.

“Jessica,” I sigh when it breaks, breathing in the scent of her hair again and just simply being thankful that she made it home with just a few bloodstains, most of which were not her own.

I was unsure at that moment if more was going to be added to my sentence. I circle my legs around her waist lazily, the rough denim of my jeans on the soft, satin skin of her sides. I grin unabashedly into her next kiss and when she asks why, I find I can't tell her. I can't tell her because what I'm thinking at that moment is that I've once again realized, with an almost childish sense of giddiness, that my girlfriend is a superhero. 

My girlfriend is a superhero. And not just because she comes home covered in bloodstains after cracking heads to save someone's life. Not because I know she's out there surveying the unsafe streets of Hell's Kitchen for psychopaths to stop. Not because she faces the demons around concrete corners , but because the ones in her mind are so much more violent and prevalent. 

I sleep beside her, a sensation that I missed when we were apart. Her body is a furnace, heating the sheets with the warm glow of her mass. First, I feel a shuffle. I know what's coming but in my sleepy daze I feel powerless to stop it. I shuffle too, extending my arm and sliding it over her stomach. I feel the inward pucker of her belly button under my hand, then the poke of her hip bone, and there I stop, rubbing circles into her warm flesh with my fingers. She stops moving a while, exhaling enormously, and I relax, though it takes me more time to feel content enough that sleep is possible. And usually, by the time I reach the finish line, she once again starts to struggle. I know this time in the pit of my stomach that it's the real deal. 

She thrashes and I attempt hold her down with my one arm, as impossible a feat as it is. Before long she sits up, rejecting my arm, gasping for air. It's like he's in the room with us, and a heavy presence comes over the atmosphere of my bedroom. The fear returns to me when it returns to her, the ghost of him lingering about her throat and strangling the air from her lungs. 

It's been some time since she battled that demon in the flesh, but not so long since he returned to her head to torment her. She sits there, sweating and shaking and trying to focus her breathing. Jessica always refused to tell me about the nightmares, and I long ago stopped asking for her stubbornness typically greatly outweighs my own. So instead I sit up, groggy, fumbling my hand for her shoulder. I stumble through the dark in search of her forehead, so that I might plant a kiss there despite its slickness, and before I can, I hear her voice shudder out of a guilt wracked frame. 

“M...Main Street.”

I find her shoulders, and fix my arm there. I hope to alleviate the burdens that sit there, paining her, pinching every ounce of suffering out of her on nights like these. 

“Birch Street.”

More composure with the second street name, and I continue to rub the bump of her shoulder in quick strides. I thought about how much this street name tactic had bothered her when it was first suggested by the therapist. She scorned it and mocked it and berated it, but it seems that she has come a lot further than either she or I had ever expected on the wings of that suggestion. 

“Higgins Drive.”

She flops backward into the bed with no warning, and I with her, for my arm is still about her shoulders. I use this as a vantage point to pull her still clammy body close to me, though I know that as a rule she dislikes cuddling. Tonight, however, I thought maybe she might let me. 

“Cobalt Lane.”

My girlfriend is a superhero, because she lets me. Despite her own dislike, despite how much she herself might know she doesn't need it. Part of her perhaps knows that I need and crave this closeness more than she does. Self sacrificial to the end, even for silly things like this. Jessica lets me pull her so close that her chin is stuffed in the crook of my neck, my arms putting pressure on her lower back. It feels as though our stomachs might touch together, and I can feel her wandering legs wrapping around mine like the slow and curling embrace of harmless garden snakes. 

We're still for a brief moment, and quiet, but then she goes again. This tells me from prior experience that this nightmare was a particularly paralyzing one. 

“Main Street.”

Her mantra begins, and I don't lessen my grip on her. It's as if she would simply float across the room if I did and I would lose her to the shadows. My girlfriend is a superhero, because she knows this without me even having to say. And so she allows me to hold her, and even holds me too, albeit limply. 

She exhales in my ear, and I can feel the distinct quiver running its course. Her nightmares are like a bad fever, only being able to be sweat out in time and agony. She always spares me the grisly details of her nightmares, not because I believe she's against talking about them, but because she doesn't want me to worry. 

Her breathing is heavy and coarse against my lobe, and I find myself rubbing her head and smoothing down her hair with one of my hands. She pauses for a long time between road signs, and I begin to think maybe she's recovered. Before long, however, her breathy voice returns, and I learn suddenly that it is not at all what I had been anticipating. 

“...Bitch Street.”

A smile shatters across my otherwise serious face like a crooked crack in the concrete sidewalk. 

“Higgins asshole Drive.” 

The unexpected and unorthodox smile I brandish only grows now, evolving into a short snicker which I hadn't entirely planned. I can tell that some sort of smile has passed over her tired face too, as I feel the morphing of her lips, pressed against my ear as they are.

She says no more compulsive street names and we fall quiet. My smile, however, remains. My girlfriend is a superhero, because she knows how inexplicably linked she and I are. She knows that when she is unwell, to a degree, so am I; when she's frightened I also have every reason to be. Even when she has a nightmare, I can't shake the feeling that I too am caught in one – at least until she pulls something like that. Until she makes me smile. 

My girlfriend is a superhero, because even in her greatest times of need, she reassures me. Even when she craves this reassurance, guidance and comfort, she provides those same things to me without having to think about it. 

The rest of the night passes in silence, and I wake up alone. Jessica is no longer in my arms, and I feel a brief but very shocking moment of distress. Certainly, it wouldn't be unlike her to slip out to do something else while I slept peacefully. It wouldn't even be abnormal for her to leave. Sometimes she was careless that way. 

I sit up in a rush, heart pounding in my head like the dull echo of a war drum. Dull and an echo was all it was, however, because as soon as I tear myself into a sitting position, dishevelled mess of blond hair in my face, I see her.  
I claw at my hair immediately, trying to fix the bed head, but it's too late because she's already seen it. I grin sheepishly, and I see a little twitch of her lips in response. It has a very short shelf life, and so I move onto cocking an eyebrow. I stare at the sordid, dark circles hanging under her eyes like purple curtains and nod at the pants she's hastily sliding into. 

“You going somewhere, Jess?”

Then it's her turn to give me a look. “No,” She scoffs, pulling the waistband of the pants – my pants, I'll add, for her jeans were still downstairs in the washer – up around her bony hips. “I'm just getting pants. It's freezing in here, Trish. You people and your air conditioning.”

I grin and shrug my shoulders noncommittally. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Jessica rolls her eyes, sporting that flirty grin that I saw so rarely, but loved dearly. Before long it falls, though, her lips coming undone until they are limp and expressionless yet again. I keep my sleep-sore eyes on her, watching her tousle some of her own equally messy hair with a hand. She feels my eyes and I know it, because before long her emerald stare jumps back to me. 

She smiles now, for real. It's not an “I told you so” smirk, or a flirty grin. It's the rarest show of affection Jessica has, and I soak it up like a long awaited burst of sunshine. The contrast of her messed and jumbled hair, her exhausted raccoon eyes, make the smile that much more meaningful because I know how truly genuine it is. 

My girlfriend is a superhero, because she smiles. She smiles at me with the most sincerest of beams, even when she doesn't want to. Even when she has little to no reason to. 

As she climbs back into bed and ultimately, surprisingly, into my arms, I bite my lip to fight the urge to whisper it in her ear like a pleasant musical note. Instead, I repeat it to myself as I feel her body going loose with sleep in my arms. I repeat it to myself in my mind, over and over again, hoping that her unflattering habits, her rough edges, her dangerous lifestyle will never cause me to forget again. I repeat it like a mantra. Like Main Street, Birch Street, Higgins Drive, Cobalt Lane. 

_My girlfriend is a superhero._


End file.
